One Perfect Storm and One Plastic Storm Shrink Holiday Sales

Retailers fought the headwinds of two entirely different storms this month, both of them likely to shrink holiday sales. The first storm was natural -- a massive blizzard in the Northeast and parts of the Midwest that kept shoppers at home on Super Saturday. The traffic-measurement company ShopperTrak found that for the full Super Saturday weekend (Dec. 18-20), year-over-year retail sales slipped 2.1 percent, totaling $18.8 billion. %%DynaPub-Enhancement class="enhancement contentType-HTML Content fragmentId-1 payloadId-61603 alignment-right size-small"%%The second storm was financial, a creation of the credit card industry, which cut customer spending limits and rejected more credit card applications than it previously had. The consumer-polling firm America's Research Group expects this tightening of credit could result in $9 billion in lost holiday sales revenue.